So what exactly is taking up so much space in my storage? Particularly the circled 240 GB portion that's always stuck on calculating
I tried using First Aid in Disk Utility & looked for anything suspicious in activity monitor but no luck
I suspect its the system data but why would it take up so much space? And how do I mitigate it?
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 15.3
The category named System Data (or Other) is a general category that measures the storage space used by all Apple and third-party files that don’t belong to any more specific category like Applications, Documents, Messages, Music Creation, Podcasts, Trash, and TV.
You can’t directly manage the contents of system data; that is done by macOS. The category varies in size depending on the current state of your Mac.
What you can do to create more free space:
• Empty the Trash in the Dock.
• Empty the trash in the Photos app.
• Delete unused and unneeded application installers from your downloads folder and desktop. No need to store on your Mac what you can freely download any time.
• Reboot your Mac at least weekly. Let the OS do its housekeeping.
• Transfer files that you don’t use daily to an external drive and then delete them from the startup drive and empty the trash. Files that take up the most room are movies, images and music.
This from Apple on the subject of freeing up space:
Free up storage space on Mac - Apple Support
Also, please see the following guidance from Apple:
Find and delete files on your Mac - Apple Support
MacOS does keep a number of Time Machine snapshots on the drive as part of the backup process. TM snapshots can occupy a significant amount of drive space. You can disable the creation of these many TM snapshots by setting TM to backup manually rather than automatically at intervals.
You can view and manage these in Disk Utility or in the Terminal app.
The category named System Data (or Other) is a general category that measures the storage space used by all Apple and third-party files that don’t belong to any more specific category like Applications, Documents, Messages, Music Creation, Podcasts, Trash, and TV.
You can’t directly manage the contents of system data; that is done by macOS. The category varies in size depending on the current state of your Mac.
What you can do to create more free space:
• Empty the Trash in the Dock.
• Empty the trash in the Photos app.
• Delete unused and unneeded application installers from your downloads folder and desktop. No need to store on your Mac what you can freely download any time.
• Reboot your Mac at least weekly. Let the OS do its housekeeping.
• Transfer files that you don’t use daily to an external drive and then delete them from the startup drive and empty the trash. Files that take up the most room are movies, images and music.
This from Apple on the subject of freeing up space:
Free up storage space on Mac - Apple Support
Also, please see the following guidance from Apple:
Find and delete files on your Mac - Apple Support
MacOS does keep a number of Time Machine snapshots on the drive as part of the backup process. TM snapshots can occupy a significant amount of drive space. You can disable the creation of these many TM snapshots by setting TM to backup manually rather than automatically at intervals.
You can view and manage these in Disk Utility or in the Terminal app.
I'd try starting up in Safe Boot mode:
Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support
Just start it up then reboot back into regular mode. Caches will be purged and if the cause was due to some temporary condition, will stay purged. If something is causing the caches to grow, then the fix will be temporary and further investigation will be necessary.
The only way I have found to reduce the System data if all other suggestions have failed is to erase the drive and reinstall the OS and then migrate your files back. You do this process from recovery mode.
Related thread
My hard drive is showing more usage than … - Apple Community
System Setting > General > Storage is not totally reliable
So I got an update. I see a cache folder in the v~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mediaanalysisd/Data/Library/Cache path that's taking up 172 GB. Is this safe to delete?
There's an unknown 240 GB taking up storage space on my Mac
